Link

Paul Chan, Now Promise Now Threat,
2005, single-channel video, 32min, still. Courtesy
the artist and Greene Naftali, New York

The Tin Drum Trilogy (2002—05), Paul Chan’s series of
video essays, explores three different moments of George W. Bush’s
war on terrorism: the US decision to invade Afghanistan (Re:
The Operation, 2002), the life of Baghdad’s citizens under
Saddam Hussein regime before the US occupation (Baghdad in No
Particular Order, 2003) and the war at home dividing red
(Republican) and blue (Democrat) states (Now Promise Now
Threat, 2005). The series is a trilogy only in hindsight. The
three videos were conceived separately and screened individually
until 2005, when, for a solo exhibition at Franklin Art Works in
Minneapolis, Chan began to show them together. The trilogy can be
distinguished from the animated projected drawings and
installations for which the artist is more widely known. Space and
duration play a less important role than they do in the artist’s
installations, which can last up to five hours, as in the case of
Sade for Sade’s sake (2009). Baghdad in No Particular
Order is the longest of the three single-channel videos (50
minutes), while Re: The Operation and Now Promise Now Threat are
each approximately half an hour in length. The videos are also
characterised by a hybrid documentary style. Interviews, handheld
camera shooting, animation, poetic voice-over, digital distortion,
photomontage, found footage and archival photographs appear in all
three works. Because of its blending of fictional and non-fictional
representational strategies, the trilogy clearly possesses an
affinity to those contemporary practices by artists (such as Hito
Steyerl and Walid Raad) whose ambition is to reinvent the creative
possibilities of documentary beyond the merely
informational.1

Re: The Operation is based on a fantasy concocted by
Chan that requires us to imagine the members of the Bush Cabinet as
if they were GIs on the front line in Afghanistan. The video is
divided into chapters, each dedicated to one representative of the
Bush administration. Each chapter is introduced by animated
drawings showing the severed head of the politician bandaged and
bloodied, barely alive. The drawings are followed by a voice-over
narrative — written by Chan — that reads aloud the hypothetical
letters that the Cabinet member would send to his or her family
back home. Sometimes the content of these letters is banal:
Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta drafts a to-do list that
includes confirming military targets and finding a shipment of
felt-tip markers, complimentary copies of Reader’s Digest
and two hundred pounds of body bags. Sometimes the letters contain
explicit references to sexual violence: ‘I will love you in a way
that goes beyond your true self’, US Attorney General John Ashcroft
says in a letter addressed to Elaine Chao, Secretary of Labor. ‘And
that’s why it will hurt, because I will mutilate you.’ Political
figures such as Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney or Colin Powell
engage in philosophical meditations on history and death and quote
from Georg Hegel, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot. ‘This
operation’, Rice declares, ‘is the pivot point of a new kind of
time.’ Most of the video is a slow progression of still
photographs. These montages feature manipulated photographs of the
politicians in GI uniforms on nondescript military bases;
various photographs (of airport hallways, train coaches, museum
displays, chocolate cakes, tourists holding cameras, fragments of
white walls, anonymous passers-by, empty skies, body parts, pets,
graffiti and scribbled notes on crumbled paper); and ‘photographic
accidents’ that we would quickly erase with the press of a button
on a digital camera. At times, this glut of images is interrupted
by clips of visual and aural noise produced through various digital
effects and distortions. An eerie high-pitched music, edging in and
out of tune, adds an uncanny and anxious feeling to the disparate
and everyday content of the images.

Baghdad in No Particular Order was produced on the
occasion of the artist’s trip to Iraq in December 2002, a few
months before the beginning of the US invasion. In September of the
same year Chan was contacted by the pacifist group Voices in the
Wilderness (now called Voices for Creative Nonviolence), an NGO
protesting against the US-UN sanctions that were designed to topple
the government of Saddam Hussein by denying food and medical
supplies to the Iraqi people. Voices in the Wilderness asked Chan
to join their members in a trip to the Iraqi capital aimed at
collecting testimonies to be used for a campaign against the
imminent war. Chan accepted the invitation and spent a month in
Baghdad meeting with local artists and activists and helping the
NGO with the production of video footage, websites and PowerPoint
presentations. Later Chan turned the footage into an art project.
Baghdad in No Particular Order does not indulge in a
rhetoric of victim- isation, nor does it provide viewers with
detailed facts and meticulous statistics, as is common in
conventional human rights videos. Rather, the video comprises
everyday, uneventful scenes: Iraqi families and children are shown
merrily dancing, oblivious to the coming war; a monkey with an
almost human face sleeps in a cage in a hotel lobby, his eyes
darting back and forth under his eyelids; a young singer with a
stunned look strives to improvise a song in front of a silent
audience. Baghdad is rendered simultaneously banal and strange. The
shaky handheld camerawork, the often low resolution of the images
and the ostensibly unedited form of the video produce an effect of
randomness and improvisation that recalls George Kuchar’s
Weather Diaries (1986—90). All the footage has been shot
by Chan through a small digital camera (we sometimes hear his voice
off-screen). As in Kuchar’s first-person documentaries, in Baghdad
in No Particular Order the camera is situated as an extension of
the author’s body and mediates his encounters with the Iraqi
people.

Now Promise Now Threat, made two years later, conveys
an image of the heavily Republican Midwestern states that
challenges the assumption that they are home to religious fanatics
and nationalist warmongers by showing nuances among their attitudes
towards faith and patriotism. The video discusses the reasons for
Bush’s 2004 re-election through a series, for example, of
interviews with the denizens of Omaha, Nebraska. A Lutheran
minister who supports Evangelical Christians opposes the mixing of
religion and the state on religious grounds; a young mother who is
anti-abortion finds it hypocritical that the pro-life movement is
also pro-war and pro-death penalty; and a young man declares he is
willing to go to war not because he endorses the Bush
administration, but simply because he wants to receive a free
education and to have a purpose in life. The interviews are
followed by footage of forlorn suburban landscapes battered by
gusty winds and dotted by churchgoers. At times aphoristic
intertitles interrupt and comment on the interviews (one reads: ‘so
it’s almost like punishment?’). Clips of public-access shows from
Omaha cable-television stations make impromptu appearances: a
preacher praises the Lord; a muscular instructor teaches
self-defence techniques; a weatherman shows forecasts which Chan
has given ironic legends such as ‘Fargo — So and So’, ‘Kansas City
— Mournful’, ‘Minneapolis — Fucked’. These ordinary scenes are
disrupted by long clips from kidnapping and beheading videos.
Downloaded from jihadi websites, the clips are transformed into
fields of undulating colour and sometimes are juxtaposed with the
voices of the Omaha interviewees. As in Re: The Operation,
sound effects play a significant role in transforming the banality
of the imagery into something strange and somehow disquieting.
Brief electronic tunes, whispering voices and humming noises create
the sense that this Midwestern landscape is haunted by ghostly
presences.

Chan’s trilogy takes its name from Günter Grass’s novel The
Tin Drum (1959).2 Raising such profound
and painful issues as the extent to which the German public was
complicit in Nazi war crimes, Grass’s novel chronicles the story of
the family of Oskar Matzerath, a boy who at the age of three
decides to stop growing and ends up in a mental institution. Oskar
repudiates the mores of Fascist Germany and its post-War amnesia,
and expresses his rage by constantly playing a toy drum and
developing a high-pitched singing voice that he can use to break
glass. Chan’s trilogy possesses significant formal affinities with
Grass’s work: both rely on hyperbolic excess, the grotesque and a
combination of the sublime and the prosaic in describing a world
where social cohesion seems to be falling apart. Chan’s series also
shares with Grass’s masterpiece an ambivalent fascination with
violence. ‘Built up, chopped down, wiped out, hauled back,
dismembered, remembered.’3 So
begins a chapter of Grass’s novel, which features several
dispassionate descriptions of violent deaths. Similarly, while
Chan’s video trilogy is supposed to offer a critique of the Bush
administration’s systematic use of violence and destruction, it
also displays a certain paradoxical attraction to it. The three
videos betray an almost obsessive interest in the cultural and
psychological effects of violence through their fragmentary form;
their digital distortions and degradations; and repeated references
to death, torture and pain.

In Now Promise Now Threat violence simmers below the
surface of the dull Nebraska landscape: it emerges from the staged
self-defence fights filling the airtime of local television
stations; it impregnates the liturgy of the Evangelical church
(Chan’s camera focuses on glasses of red wine, symbols of the blood
of Christ); it permeates the language of some of the prophetic
intertitles (‘The good cannot reign over all without an excess
emerging whose fatal consequences are revealed to us in tragedy’).
More significantly, violence haunts the viewer through the
distorted clips of beheadings and kidnappings that are repeated
throughout the works. Chan’s manipulations have an intrinsic beauty
to them, and, indeed, one feels mesmerised watching these abstract
patches of whites, reds and yellows nervously expanding and
contracting on screen. Violence also lurks under the apparently
light-hearted and feisty atmosphere of Baghdad. In Baghdad in
No Particular Order a group of middle-aged women brandish guns
and sing patriotic songs in honour of Saddam Hussein; a quiet
prayer in a cramped mosque steadily escalates into a trance-like
noisy dance; and the blurred pictures of Iraqi children who died
during a US bombing after the first Iraq war remind us of the
tragic recent history of the country. It is, however, on the
website published alongside the video that Chan hints at the
possible critical and redemptive value of destruction. It shows the
terrifying picture of an Iraqi baby, his face completely
disfigured. The photograph’s caption, written by the artist, states
that the baby was hit by a depleted uranium shell, and concludes:
‘The hope is always that the pain inflicted upon the body will
yield new insights and pleasures that will teach us to outgrow our
madness.’4 In a short essay, written
for the exhibition ‘Greater New York’ (2010) at MoMa PS1, he
suggests that pain can have a positive and generative dimension,
and uses the term ‘kairos’ to describe his ideal notion of art
(from the Greek ‘καιρός’, meaning the ‘propitious or supreme
moment’). Kairos is ‘a vital or lethal place in the body [...]
where mortality resides’, the artist writes.5 According to Chan, the traumatic encounter
with death and violence, which kairotic art is supposed to offer,
can trigger new insights into our inner self and our society.
‘Kairos is that critical point in time when a crisis or rupture
opens up and is catalysed with human will to create new potential.’
6

A similar sense of apocalyptic destruction characterises the
artist’s jarring animations, which gained him notoriety in the art
world.7My birds... trash... the
future (2004) is a seventeen-minute digital animation in which
ominous birds, desperate dogs and several suicide bombers rape,
maim, eat and terrorise one another. Happiness (finally) after
35,000 Years of Civilization — after Henry Darger and Charles
Fourier (2000—03) depicts a peaceful and bucolic landscape
where a community of prepubescent ‘Vivian’ girls lives in harmony
until this pleasurable world erupts in violence as men in suits and
army uniforms invade. The 7 Lights
(2005—07) shows ghostly silhouettes of various bodies falling down,
reminiscent of the images of people jumping out of the Twin
Towers.8 The shadow play of Sade for Sade’s
sake describes figures of slaves and masters derived from the
Marquis de Sade’s novel The 120 Days of Sodom (1785),and
is similar to Re: The Operation in its eroticisation of violence.
In the latter’s fantasy of the Bush administration fighting in
Afghanistan, references to forbidden sexual desires abound. ‘Who,
besides men,’ asks Condoleezza Rice, ‘doesn’t think that sex is a
kind of low- intensity warfare exercise?’ The theme of a perverse
fetishistic desire dominates President Bush’s chapter. ‘I feel evil
from the work and dirty from the pleasure of passivity that duty
demands’, reads Bush’s letter to his wife, Laura, while
low-resolution pixelated images of S&M practices appear on
screen. In a nondescript living room, a woman wears leather, with
her mouth gagged and her legs tied up; a man strokes his crotch
while we hear creepy moans, screams and synthesised music. Numerous
images of wounds, body parts and scars crop up throughout Re:
The Operation, veiled references to the logic of sexual
fetishism, as well as to the title of the work, evoking military
action as well as surgery. This fascination for eroticised violence
turns Re: The Operation into a remake of Pier Paolo
Pasolini’s notorious film Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma
(Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1975). Salò
transposed the narrative of De Sade’s infamous book, set in
eighteenth- century France, onto the last days of Benito
Mussolini’s regime at the end of World War II. The film depicts
four Fascist leaders in the act of torturing a group of handsome
boys and girls whom they kidnapped from a nearby village in the
north of Italy.9 Inside the rooms of a
lavish villa, the Fascists force the adolescents to participate in
orgies, masturbation and coprophagic and sodomitic acts. Violence
emerges as a meticulous ritual whereby each act of torture appears
as a highly organised theatrical event. The libertines, moreover,
appear as erudite intellectuals who quote Marcel Proust, Charles
Baudelaire and Friedrich Nietzsche, and adorn the walls of their
castle with modernist painting by Fernand Léger, Giacomo Balla,
F.T. Marinetti and Mario Sironi. Salò ends with a terrible
sequence in which all the teenagers are killed by the Fascist
militia, their eyes slashed and their skulls cut open. Eroticised
violence likewise appears in Baghdad in No Particular Order. The
adolescent girls belly dancing in front of the camera resemble
Salò’s adolescents as well as Darger’s Vivian girls, who appear in
Chan’s Happiness (finally) after 35,000Years of
Civilization. Possibly soon-to-be victims of the imminent war,
these teenagers look straight at us, inciting a certain voyeuristic
pleasure on our part while also addressing our complicity, as media
viewers, in the spectacularisation of war. Chan’s eroticisation of
violence is a provocative strategy through which the artist
critically channels the power dynamics that govern the production
and consumption of images of war. This reflection seems
particularly urgent today, when the situation in Iraq has triggered
a proliferation of cinematic and internet images of violence, a
phenomenon that has been called ‘torture porn’ or ‘war porn’.
10 This is exemplified by websites such as
nowthatsfuckedup.com, shut down by US federal authorities in 2005.
On this website American soldiers posted close-up shots of dead
Iraqi insurgents and civilians in exchange for access to porn
images, in lieu of paying the $10 registration fee.

The artist’s attraction to violence opens up serious questions
regarding the use of images of physical abuse in order to garner
interest in the politics of human rights. Is the depiction of
violence necessary in order to provoke spectators and induce them
to protest against human rights violations, or, alternatively, is
graphic violence always voyeuristic and further degrading to the
victim? While, as we have seen, Chan addresses the problematic
power relationships that characterise the consumption of images of
violence, he also seems, perhaps dangerously, to argue in favour of
a certain use of violence and destruction. In a conversation in
2005 with Martha Rosler, he passionately debated the benefits of
watching Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004),
claiming that despite the director’s conservative political agenda,
the film was to be seen since its spectacle of cruelty provided a
key to understanding and deconstructing the ideology of the right
wing. ‘What’s the point of making the audience suffer?’ Rosler
asked Chan. ‘I think it is another factor with which you provoke
people’, Chan replied. ‘Boredom is one of them, and intense
suffering that comes from bodily suffering could be
another.’11 In other words, for Chan a
certain use of violence can be welcome — the shock it produces can
activate the viewer’s thinking and political awareness. In other
interviews Chan has spoken in favour of an art of immanence that
would embrace destruction and violence as these are, for him, the
forces that qualify our present historical condition. In an
interview with George Baker he defined this aesthetic as
‘art-as-affirmation’, without further elaborating.12 Perhaps it would be instructive to read
Chan’s ambivalent fascination with violence as a strategy of
‘mimetic adaptation’ or ‘mimetic exacerbation’.13 According to Hal Foster, mimetic
exacerbation constitutes the avant-garde model articulated by
Zürich Dada artists such as Hugo Ball, who in their works used
parody, montage and chaos as a ferocious critical response to the
disasters of World War I. Mimetic exacerbation is a conscious
strategy of degradation as self-defence, premised on the notion
that violence can shock but also soothe, and that a ‘homeopathic’
dose of self-destruction can actually be generative. While Chan
never mentioned Dada as the inspiration for the trilogy, his series
of video essays may be situated within this avant-garde
tradition.

Chan’s appropriation of violence dovetails with recent
scholarship on the visual politics of human rights; this literature
has argued, contrary to the postmodernist pessimism of authors such
as Susan Sontag, that such politics requires and even benefits from
the representation of violence.14 As
Sharon Sliwinski recently demonstrated, since its beginnings in the
eighteenth century the discourse of human rights has heavily and
successfully relied on the use and circulation of images often
portraying acts of brutality. More crucially, the response of
disgust and outrage triggered by these images was key to the
formation of the universal ideals of human rights. Likewise, in the
field of photography theory, Susie Linfield has remarked that
documents of suffering can also be ‘document of protest’,
15 and, in a more nuanced way, Judith Butler
has observed that, after their discovery, the circulation and
re-framing of the Abu Ghraib pictures in magazine publica- tions
and museums meant that grief and outrage were scattered among the
public with the result that the images of instruments of
degradation were transformed into an indictment for the violation
of human dignity.16 The photographs were
published in the online journal Salon and shown in 2004 at
the International Center for Photography (ICP) in New York in the
exhibition ‘Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from
Abu Ghraib’. ‘The exhibition of the photographs’, writes Butler,
‘with caption and commentary on the history of their publication
and reception becomes a way of exposing and countering the closed
circuit of triumphalist and sadistic exchange that formed the
original scene of the photograph itself.’17

However, despite frequent allusions to brutality, sadomasochism
and abuse, violence remains largely off-screen in the Tin Drum
Trilogy. Indeed, the three videos spare viewers from such
overwhelming and unbearable pain as the truly unwatchable
Salò and The Passion of the Christ. In
Salò viewers are obliged to watch the blood that oozes
from the teenagers’ mouths when they swallow food laced with nails.
In The Passion of the Christ they see Jesus scorched and beaten to
death. In contrast, in Chan’s trilogy violence is never actually
performed in front of the camera but instead is displaced on the
surface of the image itself through visual and aural noise,
distortions and manipulations. Rather than the degradation of human
beings through torture and other unlawful acts, the videos show the
degradation of the video signal. When references to scenes of abuse
appear in the trilogy, they are obscured through the
superimposition of abstract fields of colour or through heavy
digital pixelation and blurring. However, it is important to note
that in Chan’s series sound plays a crucial part in evoking
violence. As in horror films, in his works we become aware of the
execution of terrible acts of abuse and torture only through
particular aural effects: moans, brief high-pitched screams,
creaking noises, disturbing humming sounds. It is above all through
the manipulation of the human voice that Chan alludes to violence.
The distorted clips of beheadings in Now Promise Now
Threat are accompanied by sounds of distant muttering voices
evoking human speech felled at its physical core. In other words,
Chan capitalises on what Michel Chion has called the ‘added value’
of sound to represent the violence of war.18

We could read Chan’s use of visual and aural distortion as part
of a Blanchotian aesthetic of erasure, or désouvrement.
For Blanchot désouvrement is a writing that lacks
coherence and meaning and which provides the most ethical way to
represent and remember such traumatic events as the Holocaust.
According to him the coherence of a well-formed commentary on the
disaster would make the disaster itself a ‘forgettable’ event, a
fait accompli, that has been already fully processed by memory. As
literary historian Thomas Carl Wall has argued, Blanchot’s writing
is a language in ruins ‘that tear itself apart from the moment
it begins to speak’.19 ‘Writing’, Blanchot
declared, ‘is not destined to leave traces, but to erase, by
traces, all traces, to disappear in the fragmen- tary space of
writing more definitively than one disappears in the tomb, or
again, to destroy, to destroy invisibly, without the uproar of
destruction.’20 Thinking back to Chan’s
practice in view of Blanchot’s notion of désouvrement, we
may come to understand his use of noise, blurred animations and
visual distortions as similar tactics that aim to keep the
strangeness of the original event. These effects could be
interpreted as the artist’s attempt to achieve an art of
remembrance based on Blanchotian abstraction or absence.
Importantly, for Blanchot, the aesthetic of erasure offered the
proper antidote to historical amnesia. Destruction in Blanchot’s
theory is not the equivalent of indifference to the past. Rather,
it is closely tied with a profound ethical impulse — that is, the
imperative to remember despite the unspeakable horror provoked by
events such as the Holocaust. ‘What Blanchot also insists upon’,
Steven Shaviro has observed, ‘is that this non-presence of the
past, its irrecuperability, is equally its failure to be altogether
absent. Because I cannot memorialise the past, I cannot liberate
myself from it.’ 21 ‘For Blanchot forgetting’,
Shaviro concludes, ‘does not free me from complicity, but is the
very form of my continuing implication.’22

However, Chan’s ‘writing of the disaster’ raises some crucial
questions regarding the works' effectiveness within a visual
politics of human rights. Does the articulation of this politics
depend on the fidelity of representation to the historical
referent? If so, does Chan’s strategy of erasure risk undermining
the political aspirations of his work? In defence of the Tin
Drum Trilogy, we might argue that its erasure or shattering of
the signifier affirms, rather than denies, the humanity of the
victims. As Butler has observed, commenting on the blurred faces of
the Abu Ghraib victims of torture, ‘the faces and names [of the
victims] are not ours to know, and affirming this cognitive limit
is a way of affirming the humanity that has escaped the visual
control of the photograph’.23 For
Butler, not only does the erasure of the faces of the tortured
Iraqi prisoners protect the victims from further humiliation, it
also preserves, although negatively, the ‘incommensurability’ of
human life, which should escape any normative definition. Implicit
in her argument is the idea that any visual representation of an
individual’s suffering entails some element of violence and
abstraction. Thus, to return to Chan’s trilogy of war, we might
say, following Butler, that his aesthetic of erasure is a
recognition of the element of violence that is intrinsic to
visuality, and, consequently, that his aesthetic is an attempt to
further avoid a ‘pornography’ of war.

Footnotes

On these practices, see Hito Steyerl and Maria Lind (ed.), The
Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art,
Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2008. ↑

See George Baker, ‘An Interview with Paul Chan’, October 123,
Winter 2008, pp.205—33.↑

Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (trans. Breon Mitchell), London:
Vintage, 2010, p.453. As some critics have pointed out, Grass’s
hero does not simply resist Nazi culture but, in a sense, is
influenced by it to the point of complicity. On the one hand, Oskar
vehemently criticises the society he lives in; on the other, he
shares its pathological symptoms and his aesthetic of savage noise
links him, paradoxically, to Hitler (who accepted as a compliment
the damning epithet ‘the drummer’). For this interpretation,
see David Roberts, ‘Aspects of Psychology and Mythology in Die
Blechtrommel: A Study of the Symbolic Function of the “Hero”
Oskar’, in Manfred Jurgensen (ed.), Grass: Kritik, Thesen,
Analysen, Bern: Francke, 1973.↑

For a survey of critical reception to Salò in Italy and
France, see Naomi Greene, ‘Salò: The Refusal to Consume’, in
Patrick Rumble and Bart Testa (ed.), Pier Paolo Pasolini,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994, pp.232—41.↑

For this recent literature, see, for example, Sharon Sliwinski,
Human Rights in Camera, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2011; Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A
History, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2007. For a more
sceptical view of the power of photography to activate a visual
politics of human rights, see Susan Sontag, On
Photography, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979; S. Sontag,
Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2003; and William Kaizen, ‘Aftershock and Awe, or, War
Porn, the Plight of Images and the Pain of Others’, Aftershock
Magazine, issue 1, Winter 2006, unpaginated.↑

Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and
Political Violence, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2010, p.33.↑

Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?,
London and New York: Verso, 2009.↑

Michel Chion defines sound’s ‘added value’ as ‘the expressive
and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image so
as to create the definite impression, in the immediate or
remembered experience one has of it, that this information or
expression “naturally” comes from what is seen, and is already
contained in the image itself’. M. Chion, Audio-vision: Sound
on Screen (ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman), New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994, p.5.↑

Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and
Agamben, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999,
p.65.↑

Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond (trans. Lycette
Nelson), Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992,
p.50.↑